Henry James's thwarted love

"This provocative book argues that in his fiction Henry James was more canny about sexual identities, more focused on sexual pleasure, and more insistent on flouting heterosexual convention than has been acknowledged by his critics and biographers.

Without leaping to the construction of a "gay" Henry James, whose writings aver a conscious sexual preference, the author demonstrates James's deep engagement with the construct of sexual "inversion," his familiarity with the tropes and traffic of the late-Victorian sexual underground, and his resistance to the cultural codes and institutions that disciplined social and private behavior."--BOOK JACKET.